Lawyer of 3 convicts moves court against prison authorities
Advocate AP Singh, appearing for the three of the four death-row convicts — Akshay Singh and Pawan Gupta and Vinay Kumar — in the 2012 Nirbhaya gangrape and murder case on Friday moved a Delhi court alleging that the Tihar jail authorities are not handing over documents and this is causing delay in filing their mercy and curative petitions.
Singh moved an application alleging that the jail authorities are yet to give the documents which are required to file the mercy petition for Vinay (26) and curative petitions for Akshay (31) and Pawan (25). The plea is likely to be taken up for hearing on Saturday. The apex court recently dismissed the curative petitions of other two convicts — Vinay and Mukesh Singh (32).
Mukesh's mercy petition was rejected by the President earlier this month. The hanging of all four is to take place on February 1 at 6 am, according to the fresh death warrant.
In his petition, the lawyer said he had expressed "an urgent will to file a mercy petition before the relevant authorities and undertook several steps to obtain relevant information to file it".
He said Vinay wanted to attach his personal diary containing 70 pages with the mercy petition and had asked the jail authorities to provide the same. However, the diary is yet to be provided and because of this the plea could not be filed, he said. The counsel said he had also sought some documents of convicts Pawan and Akshay which have not been provided. The petition sought a direction to jail authorities to provide the documents on "an urgent basis".
Meanwhile, Delhi's Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia accused AP Singh of making fun of the system by using tactics to delay their hanging. Sisodia said. "In the Nirbhaya case, the lawyer is using tactics to delay the execution. In this way, he is making fun of the system. We must work together to ensure speedy justice so that laws can be amended to remove shortcomings," Sisodia said in a tweet in Hindi.
The 23-year-old paramedic student, Nirbhaya, was gangraped and brutally assaulted on the intervening night of December 16-17, 2012, in a moving bus in South Delhi by six people before she was thrown out on road. She was flown to a hospital in Singapore where she died.
